The Acambaro Dinosaurs

The Acambaro dinosaurs

From: http://www.ntskeptics.org/1999/1999october/october1999.htm

By John Blanton

Dinosaurs went missing about 65 million year ago. Or did
they?

What if they really didn't. What if dinosaurs were still
around as late as 6500 years ago. And if people and dinosaurs
lived contemporaneously? That would shoot holes in a lot
of modern science. Paleontology would be badly wounded. Evolution
would be DOA. So the thinking goes.

If you could find a human fossil in the same stone with a dinosaur
fossil you would have some nice ammunition to shoot down evolution. Even
better if the fossil showed a dinosaur eating a human. If
all you had were something that looked like human footprint alongside
dinosaur footprints you might be inclined to shop further. Enter
the Acambaro dinosaurs.

A paper titled "Archeological cover-ups" by David Hatcher Childress
describes the discovery of the Acambaro dinosaur figurines. 1 In
1944 an accidental discovery of an even more controversial nature
was made by Waldemar Julsrud at Acambaro, Mexico. Acambaro
is in the state of Guanajuato, 175 miles northwest of Mexico City. The
strange archaeological site there yielded over 33,500 objects of
ceramic, stone-including jade, and knives of obsidian (sharper
than steel and still used today in heart surgery). Julsrud,
a prominent local German merchant, also found statues ranging from
less than an inch to six feet in length depicting great reptiles,
some of them in ACTIVE ASSOCIATION with humans-generally eating
them, but in some bizarre statuettes an erotic association was
indicated. To observers, many of these creatures resembled
dinosaurs. Childress further mentions that radio-carbon dating
in the laboratories of the University of
Pennsylvania and additional tests using thermoluminescence
indicated the objects were made 6500 years ago.

In Atlantis Rising , David Lewis has explained the implications
for modern science. 2 The Acambaro figurines, discovered in the
1940s in Acambaro, Mexico, depict fantastic creatures that resemble
dinosaurs, as well as African and European men. If verified as
authentic and dated to a time before modern science's discovery
of the dinosaurs, the existence of the figurines would dismantle
the major presumptions of modern evolutionary theory, and, in fact,
much of the scientific and academic establishment. Young-Earth
creationist Don Patton discussed the subject of the Acambaro dinosaurs
at September's meeting of the Metroplex Institute of Origin Science
(MIOS). He has journeyed to Acambaro to view and photograph
some of the artifacts, and he agrees with Lewis that this spells
doom for evolution. Most of those attending the meeting concurred.

Don was gracious enough to provide me with copies of some of his
photos, which we reproduce here. His printed brochure compares
one of the figurines with a drawing from Robert Bakker's book Dinosaur
Heresies (1986). The figurine so resembles the dinosaurs
in Bakker's illustration that the ancient artist must have seen
one in the flesh.

Of course, modern science is not going to take this lying down,
as both Patton and Childress have pointed out. Childress
explains the situation in his report: 3 A team of experts
at another university, shown Julsrud's half-dozen samples
but unaware of their origin, ruled out the possibility that
they could have been modern reproductions.

However, they fell silent when told of their controversial source. In
1952, in an effort to debunk this weird collection which was
gaining a certain amount of fame, American archaeologist Charles
C. DiPeso claimed to have minutely examined the then
32,000 pieces within not more than four hours spent at the
home of Julsrud. In a forthcoming book, long delayed by
continuing developments in his investigation, archaeological
investigator John H. Tierney, who has lectured on the case
for decades, points out that to have done that DiPeso would
have had to have inspected 133 pieces per minute
steadily for four hours, whereas in actuality, it would have
required weeks merely to have separated the massive jumble of
exhibits and arranged them properly for a valid evaluation.

Tierney, who collaborated with the later Professor Hapgood, the
late William N. Russell, and others in the investigation, charges that
the Smithsonian Institution and other archaeological authorities
conducted a campaign of disinformation against the discoveries. The
Smithsonian had, early in the controversy, dismissed the entire
Acambaro collection as an elaborate hoax. Also, utilising the
freedom of Information Act, Tierney discovered that practically
the entirety of the Smithsonian's Julsrud case files are missing.

After two expeditions to the site in 1955 and 1968, Professor
Charles Hapgood, a professor of history and anthropology at the
University of New Hampshire, recorded the results
of his 18-year investigation of Acambaro in a privately printed book entitled
MYSTERY IN ACAMBARO. Hapgood was initially an open-minded skeptic
concerning the collection but became a believer after
his first visit in 1955, at which time he witnessed some
of the figures being excavated and even dictated to the diggers
where he wanted them to dig.

Adding to the mind-boggling aspects of this controversy is
the fact that the Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historia,
through the late Director of PreHispanic Monuments, Dr. Eduardo Noguera, (who,
as head of an official investigating team at
the site, issued a report which Tierney will be publishing), admitted "the apparent
scientific legality with which these objects were found." Despite
evidence of their own eyes, however, officials declared that because
of the objects "fantastic" nature, they had to
have been a hoax played on Julsrud! Whether Julsrud was hoaxed is
something Patton intends to pursue, although he thinks not. He
says he plans to excavate under the kitchen floor of the former Julsrud
home in Acambaro. This floor is original from before the
time Julsrud move in, and finding similar figurines there will
rule out their being recent forgeries.

Answering questions following his MIOS talk, Don explained that
the figurines in question appeared to have been deliberately buried. They were found
in collections of twenty to thirty and packed in sand, and they are made from
local clay, which is decayed feldspar. Only ten percent of the figurines
resemble dinosaurs.

So, what does all of this have to do with Albert Einstein, Perry Mason, and The
Mysterious Origins of Man ? Glad you asked.

Patton notes 4 In the forward to the book, Earth's Shifting Crust,
Albert Einstein said Hapgood's concept could be of a "great importance
to everything that is related to the Earth's surface." Earth's
Shifting Crust was the original
title of Hapgood's book, which is now The Path of the Pole . His
idea was that all the ice at the poles represented a spinning mass that exerted
a horizontal force on the Earth's crust. In the mid 1950s, before the
modern idea of plate tectonics was developed, but while Wegener's ideas of
continental drift were being floated around, Hapgood proposed that this off-center
force occasionally shifted the crust, putting the poles at the equator and
causing other nasty results. Hapgood corresponded with Einstein on this
topic and received encouragement. Einstein recommended that Hapgood obtain "geological
and paleontological facts."

NBC first broadcast The Mysterious Origins of Man ( MOM )
in February 1996. Host Charlton Heston explained to the audience how
a lot of standard science, such as evolution, paleontology, archaeology, and
anthropology got it all wrong. Young-Earth creationist Carl Baugh helped
out by explaining the Paluxy River "man tracks."

Hapgood was there to explain the evidence of sudden Earth crustal displacement. The "fact" that
thousands of animals were frozen in short order (in geologic time) and that
ancient maps showed an ice-free Antarctica (which was then frozen over very
quickly) was given as evidence for this crustal shift. Paul Heinrich
has posted a review of these claims at
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/mom/atlantis.html.

The creator of MOM , Bill Cote, has since produced a third program
along similar lines. This latest is Jurassic Art , which deals with
two topics-the Acambaro figurines and the Ica stones.

So now we are back to where we started, as James Burke would say. A
great fan of the Ica stones is Don Patton, who has presented talks on them
at MIOS meetings. The deal about the Ica (not Inca) stones is that they
are black stones with serpentine figures carved into them. Don Patton
contends these are depictions of real dinosaurs done from life. David
Lewis had this to say about them: 5 The Ica stones are a collection of thousands
of inscribed stones found near the mysterious Nasca Lines in Peru. Many of
the stones depict Pterodactyls, T-Rexes, and humans cavorting with Stegosaurs.
Who carved these mysterious stones? Some ancient artist who somehow knew about
dinosaurs, or a modern prankster? The answer to those questions remains a mystery. Except
to you, of course. Dating both the Acambaro figurines and Ica stones
has proved inconclusive. Unfortunately, both the stones and figurines have
been removed from their original settings, making reliable dating difficult,
if not impossible. In the Peruvian case, the curator and discoverer of the
artifacts, Javier Cabrera, a medical doctor, refuses to reveal the location
of a cave where he allegedly found the stones, leading archeologist Neil Steede,
who investigates both cases on Cote's Jurassic Art, to question the doctor's
story. So, we come to the end of the tale, and we still don't know what's behind
the Acambaro dinosaurs.

Are the figurines really 6500 years old? Don Patton, who appears to
finally accept radio-carbon dating, would only give the "dinosaurs" 1500 years
in his talk. A human figure he allowed 4000 years.

Are they even authentic? If they are 1500 years old and more, then it's
likely they are. That was way before people found sport in fooling archaeologists.

If they are authentic, do they represent dinosaurs? Some of the ones
exhibited are dead ringers for dinosaurs, but they were culled from a reported
cache of over 30,000 items. Many of the figurines presented as dinosaurs
required a bit of a stretch to make the resemblance. It's possible we
are just seeing some selective sampling. Given the amount of variation
apparent in the collection there was bound to be a dinosaur in there somewhere.

Research into the mystery of the figurines since the MIOS lecture has not
provided further explanation, so for the time being we will have to leave it
at that. Some stories just don't have neat endings.

Oh wait. I forgot to tell about Perry Mason, although it has absolutely
no significance to the story. Accompanying Hapgood in his 1955 investigation
of the figurines was prolific detective fiction writer Earl Stanley Gardner. The
Acambaro dinosaurs, it would seem, had something for everybody.

Refrences

1. Childress, David Hatcher. Archeological Coverups? Posted by
the World Explorers Club at http://www.keelynet.com/unclass/canyon.txt. In
the quoted excerpt I have fixed some of the inconsistencies in spelling and
punctuation. The capitalization has been left intact.